You know what the biggest no-brainer of no-brainers there are when it comes to a successful video on YouTube? Whenever “Sesame Street” or “The Muppets” or anything Jim Henson has ever had his fingerprints on decides to do a parody of something already in the public consciousness. So when Sesame Street released a video of the iconic Cookie Monster singing “Share It Maybe,” a parody of the tremendously popular Carla Rae Jepsen song “Call Me Maybe,” well, it didn’t take any time at all for that video to hit over 2 million views in just a day.

Sesame Street: Share It Maybe

First off, if you’re not aware, here’s the Carla Rae Jepsen song, “Call Me Maybe,” which has the very sound VEVO numbers of 150 million views:

Yeah, it’s your basic, everyday happy pop song that you will find yourself singing at the grocery store but have no idea why.

So, “Sesame Street” and Cookie Monster changed some of the lyrics to include a longing for cookies:

After watching this, try to look for a reason not to say, “But you got COOKIE.” You can’t, you’re screwed.

What makes this a much bigger hit than usual for “Sesame Street” is that this is something that crosses over in popularity from the narrow demographic of “kids” to “everyone who has ever liked Sesame Street.” Considering that “Sesame Street” has been around for more than 40 years, that probably includes, oh, everybody. Because this isn’t just an educational video for kids, and taps into something popular, it’s something that everyone will seek out and enjoy.

Since the average “Sesame Street” video on YouTube gathers at or around 100,000 views, the fact that this is at or around 2 million shows the power of leveraging already popular entertainment. You have to stand out in some way: it’s easy for “Sesame Street” because they are already a popular entertainment themselves. But if you leverage something popular, it usually requires that you do it in an interesting, witty way. That’s how Walk Off the Earth scored one of the biggest hits of 2012 with a unique version of Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know” back in January:

It’s arguable that their own video led to Gotye’s tremendous rise into consciousness this year, considering that Gotye’s version came out last summer, but it would not have had the impact it did had it not been done in such a clever way.

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